Telemarketer Compute Scammers Caught Red Handed

Scammers, unsurprisingly, have found a new way to go about their diabolical plans, and this time around, it involves scaring people into getting their computers "serviced". More to the point, the latest scamming modus operandi hitting the country involves having scammers call their targets, pretending to be technical support, and having the unsuspecting marks pay for nonexistent services to deal with Trojans, botnets, spyware, viruses, and worms that weren't even in the computer.

It's because of this that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has put its foot down in order to stop these nefarious ne'er-do-wells from victimizing even more users out there. The FTC was able to get a federal judge to order six of these cheating telemarketer con men to stop their illegal operations as well as freeze over $180,000 worth of assets.

This crackdown happened around Wednesday last week

On October 3. As part of their MO, the telemarketing scammers got users to view the utility log of their computers that shows errors and warnings, making them think that their computer is broken. The swindlers will then offer to remove the "malware" that had been "causing" the errors (which occur as part of a machine's normal, everyday operation) for a certain fee.

Essentially, the victimized users were ignorant of how their computers worked, thus allowing scammers to charge them for services that weren't needed in the first place to "fix" a computer that wasn't broken at all. As per usual, these scams prey on the ignorance of non-tech-savvy people.

The FTC was able to go about their investigation of these criminals by pretending to be unaware consumers themselves. The organization then learned that these telemarketing con men were even threatening users by saying that without purchasing a "fix" from them, their computers could very well self-destruct and explode.

That's a silly notion for many, but by wording it in a highly technical way... like, say, telling the consumer that the internal components of the computer will overheat to the point of frying its circuits if the malware that's eating up all the resources of the machine isn't removed... there will be people who'll believe the poppycock that these con artists are spewing out.